Plague and war are stern reminders that tough times call for great leaders. Yet when it came to the sludgy and authoritarian pandemic response across much of the West, those already sceptical of the competence and nobility of ruling elites were provided with ample confirmatory evidence. As did the war in Ukraine which has, even more so than plague mismanagement, brutally collided decades of idealistic and atomistic energy and food policy against the rocks of reality. “Everyone has a plan”, as an insightful pugilist once put it, “until they get punched in the mouth.”
At a time of such increasing geopolitical instability and social unease across the West, there is substantial change required to address what has been revealed about the system in recent years. But Martin Gurri in his book, The Revolt of the Public, described how “the present elite class has disqualified itself from reforming the system. It has no interest in taking on the job, and have no clue how to proceed if it tried. The elites, like Icarus, appear content to glide above the masses until it is too late to avoid a crash.” (pg. 337) The elites, to provide a simple definition, are the people who run the institutions which make modern life possible. And to Gurri, the internet has been key to facilitating the understandable distrust held by the public for the elites:
“Modern government, above all, is institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality. It behaves as if imposture and depravity will never be found out—but under digital dispensation, everything is found out. The public is accustomed to proximity but finds the exercise of power removed an impossible distance away: reasons are never given, questions are never answered, and in this way begins the long, foul rant, that is our moment in history.” (pg. 344)
But what could the people of Ireland – the inheritors of successful revolution against the greatest empire the world has ever seen – possibly have to be unhappy about? Is Ireland not ridiculously wealthy with the second highest GDP per capita in Europe, behind only Luxemburg, sitting “133 % above the EU average”? Surely such obscene wealth means the Irish public are happy with their elites and have no reason to partake in “the long, foul rant, that is our moment in history”? If only.
Matt Taibbi has described the apparent attitude of typical Western elites with wry precision: “Over here are people who are conscientious and believe in science and fairness and democracy and puppies, and then everyone else is a right-winger.” It must be said, however, that it would require mind reading to determine whether the actions of these therapeutic-technocratic-totalitarians stems from naïveté or evil or both. Hence I have taken, somewhat clumsily, to making up a word: naïevil. Examples of naïevil behaviour by elites are legion, with the aforementioned areas of plague, energy, and food providing prime starting points.
Plague
Elite mismanagement of the plague is evidenced by how poorly Ireland, the second richest country in Europe, did in terms of excess death across the three pandemic years of 2020-2022. Despite imposing draconian and civil liberty destroying Chinese Communist inspired lockdown measures, figure 1 below shows Ireland did twice as bad as Sweden on the excess death front. I chose Sweden as they adopted an anti-lockdown approach and hence managed to save their kids from the fate we imposed on our children.
Figure 1: sourced from Cato Institute
Ireland, unlike Sweden, chose prolonged school closure policies which were catastrophic for child development. Particularly for the already disadvantaged kids whose parents were not part of what Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University calls the “laptop class”. In the Irish Independent on February 25th 2023, Professor Martin Cormican, a member of the national group who guided pandemic policy here in Ireland, shed some light on why school closures may have been imposed in Ireland longer than the international average, despite lacking scientific justification for doing so:
“Cormican is adamant that children will pay the price for this “for decades to come”, noting education as the single biggest determinant of health…The decision to close schools was not a child-centred one, Cormican believes; he says that it was instead driven by “vested interests”. “There were people who were very invested in not having the schools open, in relation to fears for themselves and others but very little of it was about the children, it was about other people,” he says…The strength of his feeling is apparent as he talks about the “abandonment” of children with special needs and those from deprived areas.”
In the bigger picture of human suffering, Ireland’s choice to play along with Communist China inspired naïevil lockdowns added international pressure on other countries to follow suit. Professor Bhattacharya notes the particularly dark impacts of these internationally pressured lockdowns in poorer countries:
“In poor countries, lockdowns, which were recommended to them by the World Health Organisation, impoverished tens of millions of people. They caused mass unemployment and disrupted food production, “pushing tens of millions more people” in the developing world into hunger. Indeed, in July 2020, the United Nations reported that 10,000 children per month were dying from starvation brought on by supply-chain disruptions. The devastating trend of significantly higher starvation-related deaths in developing countries will likely continue due to the “aftershocks” of lockdown policies.”
As if none of the above data from the three pandemic years were bad enough, July 2023 showed Ireland to have a 13.7% excess death rate compared to the average number for the same period in 2016 to 2019. This startling number, 4.8% above the 2020-2022 pandemic average, placed Ireland as the 4th highest in all of Europe. Only Malta, Cyprus, and Greece were worse off than Ireland, but the Eurostat report suggested this was “very likely related to the heatwaves in that month” in those three countries. If correct, this means that irregular weather aside, Ireland was the worst country in Europe. And if we were to draw further comparison, Sweden’s was -3.2%. Yes, minus 3.2%. This excess death rate is a scandalous legacy from gross pandemic mismanagement, and symptomatic of a crumbling health system.
Energy
On the energy front, I described Ireland’s abysmal energy security in late 2022. About six months later, Russian naval activity off Ireland’s coast led me to revisit these concerns in a piece for Gript – concerns since validated by the Irish Examiner and Fox News. As such, I won’t re-invent the wheel here. However, it is worth highlighting that our ability to keep the lights on has taken yet another blow recently with the blockage of the proposed LNG port in Kerry – the same kind of port which the famously environmentally conscious Germans have been scrambling to build in the aftermath of the mysterious Nordstream pipeline attacks. Alas, thanks to naïevil sabotage of Ireland’s energy security, we will be at the mercy of a single foreign government to a worrisome degree.
Moreover, despite Ireland being the ‘worst prepared country in Europe’ going into last winter, to my knowledge we still have no gas reserves for a rainy day coming into this winter. If so, this is a dereliction of duty by the government bordering on treachery. Last winter was a lucky break on the weather front which meant we were not bitten by the fact Ireland is at the end of Europe’s gas pipeline. The chances of such lucky weather two years consecutively appear slim. We may face a cold and dark winter ahead due to such naïevil policies – especially if the Ukraine war escalates or wider geopolitical tensions produce more surprises. Peter Ryan alluded to this possibility for Gript when pointing to the sabotage of the LNG proposal for Kerry making us increasingly dependent on the Moffat pipeline from the UK:
“The most necessary input of Ireland’s energy system is now totally in control of a foreign government. When more shortages occur, like they have been occurring all throughout the last 2 years, the UK will no doubt prioritize its own voting constituents over those of Ireland.”
Food
On the food front, Irish elites continue to partake in anti-human scapegoating of livestock farmers as if they didn’t feed people. Brendan O’Neil wrote in Spiked how Net Zero “neo-pagans” look toward Irish animal sacrifice while ignoring a simple fact: the food we don’t produce will likely be produced by countries “’with worse green credentials than Ireland’”. And when we consider that in 2021 “Ireland’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions was 0.1%”, discussions about cattle burps are moot. “To believe that the number of cattle alive in Ireland somehow impacts the weather”, wrote Doomberg, “is the functional equivalent of insisting leprechauns are real.”
Furthermore, even if Irish cow burps were genuinely more likely to change the weather than tribal raindancing, it is profoundly anti-human to attack farmers in the midst of a global food crisis. The food crisis described by Professor Bhattacharya above was initially created by Communist China inspired naïevil lockdown policies, and was then massively worsened by the war in Ukraine which disrupted food and fertilizer exports from the region.
As a relevant aside, the essay of mine about Russian Naval activity also touched on the concept of “food sovereignty”, and the Irish peasant farming organization, Talamh Beo. Apart from the observed effects of “food sovereignty” based farming on rooted communities, biodiversity improvements, and soil health, it offers even greater theoretical potential on the food security front since it doesn’t depend on imported inputs like synthetic nitrogen fertilizer made through the Haber-Bosch process. Such considerations are deadly serious as the world becomes increasingly unstable geopolitically and future supply chain disruptions seem more likely.
Policing
And there is so much more to rant about. Irish elites have created such conditions for the Gardaí, that our policing commissioner recently received a 98.7% no-confidence vote by the Garda Representative Association who have now even voted to strike.
Health
Elites have overseen such an inefficient, inhumane, unsafe, and censorial health system, that doctors and nurses trained here look to flee the country for greener pastures.
Military
Elites have undervalued and underappreciated the armed forces so much that they have a major recruitment and retention crisis in which they can neither attract, nor retain, the very best people suited to protecting our nation and assets at a time of increasing geopolitical chaos and uncertainty. To illustrate this point, the ideologically monosyllabic Irish NGO sector was handed about 5.5 billion euro of taxpayer money in 2019. This is almost 5 times the 1.174 billion in military funding outlined in Budget 2023.
Migration
Elites have not only complied with, but fuelled reckless European migration policy – policy which even Germany is starting to recognise as crazy – while simultaneously failing to address the ever worsening housing crisis which the last election was, lest we forget, largely fought over. “Left-leaning Sinn Féin”, wrote the BBC in February 2020, “managed to successfully tap into the public anger felt in the Republic of Ireland over issues that have dogged centre-right Fine Gael for a number of years – a shortage of housing, rocketing rents and homelessness, analysts suggest.” And now, in 2023, our “unprecedented” housing crisis is contributing toward 70-75% of Irish young adults considering emigration.
Figure 2: Far-left activists protesting the Let Women Speak event on 16th Sept 2023 in Dublin. Circled are Communist flags with “transgender” colours on them. To the right is Communist leader Vladimir Lenin’s face overlaid on “transgender” colours.
Indoctrination
Elites have sanctioned the infection of Irish education with far-left victimism “which uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power” – an ideology that has been termed Maoism with American Characteristics in the European Parliament. This far-left ideology, at work in figure 2 above, deploys resources like “the manipulative and unscientific Genderbread Person infographic” to indoctrinate children into believing their “identity” can be male, female, both or neither. Totalitarian far-left victimism has been idea laundered through a shoddy, absurd, and incestuous academic cesspit. These are radical activist corners of academia so intellectually incurious and ideologically blinkered, that in the troubling Grievance Studies Hoax of 2018, a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf was accepted for publication by “feminist social work journal Affilia”.
Totalitarianism
Elites have established an “Electoral Commission” as an Irish Ministry of Truth who get to decide the “mis” or “disinformation” worth censoring. Deeply troubling about this, of course, is that today’s “misinformation” can become tomorrow’s fact. One need only look to the Hunter Biden laptop story from the weeks prior to the 2020 election. This story was initially censored and dismissed as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”, but turned out to be a fully authentic source of damning material. Douglas Murray has described how, in the weeks prior to the election, the laptop story was buried and discredited by Democrat supporting elites despite containing “information that exposed corruption on an extraordinary scale in what is now the first family.” Both Joe and Hunter have serious questions to answer. Another example of wrongful censorship, and one which I have previously explored, is the “Naïevil Truth Policing” around the possible lab leak origins of the Wuhan pandemic. This entirely plausible origin story was endlessly presented as a “conspiracy theory” and suppressed by the very sort of totalitarian elites I argue have been Chinafying the West.
What threats do the Irish public face to seeking and speaking truth now that we have state appointed “philosopher king” style elites? Are we going the way of Germany who, as I have previously described, are criminally persecuting a satirist for criticising face masks, while also discussing the merits of banning an anti-establishment political party who are supported by a fifth of the German people? Or the way of an increasingly dystopian Canada where, as Stephen Moore described for Public, Justin Trudeau has falsely accused opponents of Nazism and racism, froze the bank accounts of protesters, and demonized parents concerned about gender ideology being taught in schools. Moore argues that “Trudeau embodies many of the traits of left-wing authoritarians.” CJ Hopkins, the aforementioned satirist being persecuted in Germany, offered a complimentary explanation as to why “Trudeau can denounce the Canadian truckers as fascists, and persecute them, and run them down with horses, one day, and then slobber over a literal Nazi the next.”
On a related note to this Platonic guardian style “Electoral Commission”, our elites are ramming through a despotic shambles of a bill containing “hate-speech” laws which, as I argued for Free Speech Ireland, “will only serve to stifle important discourse, divide us ever further into conflicting identity groups, and better equip predatory people in positions of power to consolidate their control over the Irish public.” Helen Joyce, former editor at the Economist and author of Trans, has described these laws as “literally Orwellian”. Irish elites appear to distrust and despise the public so much they want to muzzle us through totalitarian “hate speech” laws which do not even try to define “hate”, which allow the Gardaí to search your house and seize your devices, which reverse the burden of proof as if you were a drug dealer such that you’ll need to prove your innocence, and which open the door to the very kind of political censorship desired by the Soviet Union when they pushed “hate speech” laws into place after World War 2.
Successors
Elections are coming and we need radical change before it is too late to salvage our future. And not the sort of change likely should Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, or Labour gain power either. None of those supposed “opposition” parties actually opposed the totalitarian bill criminalizing “hate speech” concocted by the coalition in power. In fact, only 14 “No” votes were offered against 110 in favour of these “literally Orwellian” laws. This is a perfect illustration of the diabolical state of our current political elites. The Irish Independent’s Ian O’Doherty straightforwardly described in The Spectator a few months back how this “completely bonkers” bill is “bad law with bad intentions and will have terrible consequences for Irish democracy and freedom.” The “hate speech” laws being foisted onto the people of Ireland are such a poisonous and treacherous insult to Irish democracy and society at large, that any politician who voted in favour is facing an outrageously steep gauntlet of fire if they have any hope of proving they aren’t a predatory wolf in kindly sheep’s clothing.
Though amidst darkening clouds, I genuinely believe Ireland can get on track toward building the sort of country reflective not only of our wealth, but of the weighty ancestral inheritance it is all too easy for us to take for granted. Ireland – richly abundant in culture, character, intellect and material – has the sort of potential for flourishing that the revolutionary forebears who bled for us might scarcely have dreamed. Yet we also have the sort of elite incompetence and grandiose disregard for the public they would have feared as nightmarish. Gurri described the sort of elites he’d look for instead:
“The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight. . . . Honesty means that the relationship to truth, as truth is perceived, matters more than ambition or partisan advantage. Humility means that the top of the pyramid looks to the public as a home it will return to rather than a carnivorous species from which to hide. Truth must be spoken even when it hurts the speaker or the audience. Distance must be reduced to a minimum, even at the risk of physical danger. . . . In the end, everything will hinge on the public: on us. . . . we have lost the right to rant about our rulers. Instead, we must go about the job of selecting their successors.” (pg. 348-349)
The situation is clear. Elites are inevitable, and if Ireland has any hopes of flourishing toward our potential as a nation, we need new ones. But who is truly honest and humble enough to serve the people of Ireland?
Ciarán O’Regan is an Irish physical culturalist and curious generalist. His Substack is Quarrelsome Life, his Twitter is @quarrelsomelife, and he co-hosts the Learning to Die Podcast with Dr Ian Dunican.